I’ve always though we should have open borders with the UK. Or at least reciprocal work and live privileges. I suspect both countries would benefit. Both counties could still have controls at the borders for security, but otherwise let there be free movement.
True open borders, ie treat flights as internal, means a common visa policy as well (like Schengen in Europe - otherwise someone could get a UK visa and then come to America), but reciprocal rights to live and work, what the EU calls "free movement of labour", yeah, why not?
UK/US, tens of thousands a year, but low tens. Might get an occasional surge, like the many well-educated cosmopolitan Brits who left the country after the Brexit vote (though Trump certainly would have put some off).
You could see a net flow of the chronically ill to the UK, ie permanent benefits tourism, with a converse flow to the US of people who are willing to risk poorer insurance. Risk-pool death spiral.
That's what homo economicus would do, but in practice I think that the number of people who want to pick up and move their lives over across an ocean is small enough that it's probably not a really big deal.
I remember when I suggested in this comment section that someone who was really irate that DC residents don't get congressional representation should move a few miles in literally any direction, and they were like "HOW DARE YOU SIR?"
Non-citizens resident in the UK have to pay an annual fee for use of the NHS - the "immigration health surcharge" - but £624 per year is still pretty cheap compared to US health insurance.
Also, chronically ill people tend to be less mobile - they're older, more established in their jobs/careers, and they are chronically ill and have built up support systems around where they live.
It seems likely there could be complete freedom of movement among all the Five Eyes countries and Japan and Taiwan with little political backlash in any of them, it probably wouldn't even be that noticeable to most people.
Probably, though how many people would really want to move there, if they weren't independently wealthy or didn't have some relatively high status job lined up there?
The weeaboos who would actually go do it have usually already tried (usually "teaching English" to support themselves while comically failing to make some kind of arts career and returning home).
Congress as admissions committee - trying to curate and shape this year's matriculating class. Make sure it has the right mix of diversity, legacies, merit, ability to pay, etc.
As an example of an unintended consequence, if Canadians were allowed to live and work freely in the US, we wouldn't have gotten the delightful 2009 romcom The Proposal starring Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock with the latter as the undocumented Canadian immigrant (kind of ironic since it's Reynolds who was *actually* born in Canada).
To protect American jobs, we have to pass legislation preventing the impersonation of Americans by foreign actors.
It's not just Ryan Reynolds, though he's a repeat offender. Why did Anya Taylor-Joy, an Argentine Brit, have to take jobs away from hard-working Kentuckians for "The Queens Gambit"? Aussies like Mel Gibson pretending to work for the LAPD? Another Brit like Daniel Kaluuya, stealing American jobs -- I just want to tell him to Get Out of Our Country.
No American roles for foreign actors! Keep America American, on the screen!
AT Joy played an American (well, proto-American) in The Witch, too. But what’s weird is that in that movie her character immigrated from England so she speaks with a British accent, but in the DVD extras she sounds American, whereas in the extras for Queen’s Gambit, where her character is American, she sounds British! She’s just messing with us.
I went to a science fair a few years ago, and it was really striking how many of the kids presenting were children of immigrants. It makes perfect sense to make it as easy as possible to get these visas.
Blue collar and service wages are increasing for the first time in a generation. Yet many American workers are still far from a living wage. I see signs at Georgia Krogers advertising $12/hr. Gas station in Maine were advertising $13.50/hr. Employers obviously think these are “good” wages because they are advertising them openly. Yet I have no idea how someone making $13.50 an hour in Bangor can pay for an apartment and still have enough money to heat it.
A true populist would not panic at the first signs of inflation or restaurants being short staffed. He would permit there to be a shake out in the restaurant industry where places that figure out how to pay a living wage survive and places whose business models require worker exploitation close.
We’ve had abundant labor and stagnant working class wages for 35 years. It has wrought carnage throughout the American working class: men who cannot provide for families, women who cannot find marriageable men, children born out of wedlock, opiate addiction and deaths of despair. Life expectancies were decreasing before COVID. Let’s give scarcity a chance. If a significant number of American manufacturers start going bankrupt because labor is too expensive, the case for increased immigration would become strong. Until then, increasing working class wages is a political and moral imperative.
Yeah. The individual vs. household income dynamic seems missed here. Also the transient nature of poverty that both narrowly minimum wage positions and poverty - in general - are temporary. The cohort ages out. Long-term individual poverty is exceedingly rare.
"Using an after-tax household income measure, we estimate that while roughly 1 in 10 people are in poverty in any given year, over 4 in 10 people spent at least one year in poverty between 2007 and 2018. This implies substantial mobility in and out of poverty—for example, 41 percent of those in poverty in 2007 were out of poverty in the following year."
Further: Just 9% of <those in poverty >were poor for at least 10 of the 12 years through 2018.
UC Davis has good research here too - this one is on "deep poverty" but similar findings ... "While most spells of deep poverty in the U.S. are short, with two-thirds of individuals who fall into deep poverty exiting in two years or less, re-entry is also common."
I'll edge away from the qualitative question of "goodness" and hang tight on the claim that it's not reasonable to expect that _all_ jobs will pay enough to maintain a residence on one salary.
"Service jobs" does not necessarily equal "gas station attendant". The two largest sub-categories (by job number) under "services-providing" in the BLS stats are "State and local government", followed by "Professional and business services" and "Health care" in a near tie -- there's obviously a spread of incomes in those sectors as well, but I feel very safe claiming that their median is well above "gas station attendant."
To narrow in on the point a bit: the world needs gas station attendants too. All jobs should have dignity, and gas station attendants shouldn't fear that a health problem will drive them into penury. And for absolutely certain, they should be able to be _housed_. But setting the bar at "...and not only housed, but be able to afford housing alone or even as the sole breadwinner in a family" seems like an incredible stretch, and more to the point one that would be much easier to achieve by building a lot more state-provisioned housing than by fussing around with immigration policy at any level.
(Back in the qualitative world, I'm not even sure that living alone is a good idea for most people, but I'm aware that opinions on that differ wildly and passionately, and for sure this country has demonstrated a remarkable lack of aptitude at building group housing situations at any level above "flophouse".)
This entire article is talking about how to increase immigration of skilled workers, who, by definition, are not competing for $12/hr restaurant jobs.
In fact, they're precisely the people whose lifestyles increase aggregate demand for those jobs, thereby pushing up wages.
If you want to get past the last 35 years of, I agree, importation of low-cost, low-skilled labor... the best way to speed that up is to pull a bunch of folks in who will be at or near the top of the pyramid.
One of the fundamental cognitive errors of populism is imagining that the economy is zero sum- that there's a fixed bowl of wealth, and 'we' (I'm sure all populists are 100% descended from an original Native American tribe, of course) have to hoard it and keep 'them' from getting any of it. In fact the economy is positive sum- letting in more smart people increases the total amount of wealth and makes everyone richer. That's why the country that literally had open borders for the entire 19th century is now the world's wealthiest!
Anyways, seeing as I do recognize that letting in lots of less-skilled immigrants is politically unpopular even if it's a good idea- increasing *skilled* immigration is not gonna affect your $13.50 gas station attendant dude. We're talking more software engineers and more scientists
And your fundamental cognitive error is failing to account for the fact that, while immigration is overall a good thing, the benefits do not accrue to all Americans equally.
Increased national wealth = more money for a stronger social welfare state. I am pro-capitalism, tax it fairly, and then use those funds to help the poor. Universal healthcare, a negative income tax- you name it, I'm for it. This is the way.
If you disagree, please let me know how a poorer United States with less national wealth will be helping the poor. With a shrinking population, less workers to pay into Social Security, more retirees and less young workers contributing to the tax rolls for our already enormous social welfare expenses..... How do you imagine this working?
Yes, if you can increase immigration and the welfare state then great. But if you can’t increase the welfare state then you can’t increase immigration either.
I was reading an article about how pro immigration economists privately acknowledge that low skill immigration while a net positive in the long term results in some losers. However there is an unspoken agreement to play it down. It may have been Noah Smith who wrote about it. Not sure.
Cool. So if we tax the obscene concentrated wealth of multi-billionaires that is distorting our economy and undermining our democracy, we can get less of it? I'm in!
"... benefits do not accrue to all Americans equally."
Surely true. But to justify immigration, it's probably sufficient that they accrue *proportionally*, even if not equally.
So, sure -- Zuckerberg is going to capture a lot more of the benefits of growth than Tiffany at the diner does, because the billionaires gobble up most of everything. But if her wages go up proportionally, then doesn't she win from immigration, too?
Huh? Do children growing up make people's wages go down? Did wages drop for low-skilled workers when the Baby Boomers (the US's largest cohort of children) came of age?
Immigrants are just someone else's babies, to rephrase Steve King (!). Every low-skilled immigrant needs to buy houses and food and furniture and toiletries etc. These create jobs for Tiffany just as much as they compete for her current one.
As well as helping to fund Tiffany's Social Security pension after she retires, bringing more customers into the diner, reviving the small-town tax-rolls so that they can re-open the public library, etc. etc.
I was wrong to focus only on her wages in considering the case that she shares in the benefits.
I remember how foreign it seemed, as student in the late 90s in Vienna, seeing grown men who had "real" jobs as waiters at neighborhood cafes - and they weren't depending on tips to get by, because nobody paid them tips.
"...a member like Rep. Darryl Issa (R-CA) will write a bill that sounds good to me."
Insert Onion's "Worse Person You Know Just Made a Great Point" meme.
Do you have a new editorial assistant? Today's column was uncommonly well written, just at the level of prose. Sentences ran smoothly. I did not notice typos. (Though perhaps other readers did). Anyhow -- it's nice when your columns are properly proofed.
How can we (realistically) get more skilled immigrants into the US? I think the most realistic path is just lengthening OPT visas for STEM grads of US colleges. Every time you suggest importing current working professionals, like software engineers, existing domestic groups are opposed to the competition- I've even seen people express that sentiment here on SB. Whereas, a brand new Master's or PhD grad doesn't have many job skills yet, so it seems like an easier/more realistic way to get smart folks in. Lengthen the OPT period to 5 or 10 years, and maybe provide a path to a Green Card directly from there.
My further out there idea is that the federal government could allow individual states to issue more visas, above & beyond what the feds do. It would certainly make the rich states richer as California, Massachusetts etc. let in more smart immigrants and Arkansas obviously doesn't- but could be a viable path too, use lots of federalism arguments, etc.
"...the most realistic path is just lengthening OPT visas for STEM grads of US colleges...Lengthen the OPT period to 5 or 10 years, and maybe provide a path to a Green Card directly from there.."
I vote for this. Though I don't think it needs to be restricted to STEM graduates. If a new PhD in Indonesian History wants to stay and duke it out in the job market, let them.
"...allow individual states to issue more visas, above & beyond what the feds do."
The Constitution gives Congress the power "To establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization...," and I am pretty sure that "uniform" precludes differences between states.
That was among the changes from the Articles -- States gave up the right to set independent immigration policies. And I believe Congress cannot make different policies for different states, either.
Immigration law already has visas with numbers tied to local economic indicators like GDP, unemployment, etc --- the existing (much-criticized) EB-5 investor program has investment thresholds that vary and, IIRC, a stream that's only available in some places. Similarly, you can only get an H1-B if you're going to be working somewhere that isn't on strike and will pay you a salary that's above a local threshold.
Whether expanding this with employment-based immigration in this way --- adding new would-be employees in places that already have a job shortage, for example --- a different question, but it's at least possible to do this sort of policy design.
(Whether it's possible to go full-on Canada and have state nomination programs, now that's a more interesting question....)
(I'm not a lawyer, I'm just pretending to be one on the Internet) I don't see why it's not uniform if you offer the *option* to issue extra visas to all 50 states. If some don't choose to take you up on it, that's up to them. It's really not setting different policies for different states. Choosing to delegate is part of having a power!
It would set up some pretty interesting battles in red states- lots of them are heavy agricultural visa users, and I bet business & Big Farm interests would start pressuring legislators there to issue more of those. Anything that sets the right up to fight itself sounds like a good wedge issue to me
A plan to States to sponsor immigrants would definitely have to be approved by Congress, but its power to take immigration policy doesn't preclude it from also delegating some immigration decisions to States. I think State sponsorship of immigrants is very good idea.
It would only work, though, probably, if the immigrants were required to maintain residency in the sponsoring State until citizenship. Once a citizen, neither Congress or States can restrict interstate movement. But for legal residents that aren't citizens, that likely is permissible, depending on how literally one reads the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment, which only applies to "citizens".
You could separate the visa from the work permit and only make it legal to work in states that have granted permission to do so. You can travel and live where you like, but you can't work there.
“In economic terms, though, the number of new people arriving legally is what counts, so the fact that fewer than 100 percent of the new immigrants are actually new arrivals somewhat reduces the economic benefits of recapture.” Some of the nonimmigrants in H or L status will eventually get tired of waiting for a green card and move to another country, or get an H/L extension application rejected and be forced to leave. So the economic impact might be a little bigger than implied by the “new arrivals” figure.
This sentence bothered me too, because it misses that some H/L nonimmigrants getting LPRs will increase economic output since they can more readily move to better-fitting jobs or start companies that in turn employ people, which is difficult (though not impossible) as a nonimmigrant.
I can’t help but think that the positive wage and benefit changes resulting from the labor shortage are at least partly the result of the fall in immigration.
So, I *think* that MY's response will be that this effect is outweighed by total economic growth due to immigration. But I'd be curious to see the numbers penciled out.
One thing that I would've liked to see more in this article is just more discussion of what consensus exists on the economic effects of immigration.
Sure, immigration causes growth because each immigrant adds some output, but does the economy grow in per capita terms? If so, through what mechanisms? And does this growth benefit everyone?
Not that it isn't plausible that immigration has the beneficial effects claimed in this article-- I'd just be interested in seeing the research that backs up those claims.
According to Noah Smith: "Immigration can occasionally have some small negative impacts on labor markets. In the middle of an economic catastrophe like the Depression, when jobs are scarce, it can bump a few people out of jobs. New immigrants can compete with existing immigrants.
But overall, immigration — even of the lowest skilled variety — has very little or no impact on native-born wages. And sometimes even a positive impact. The most probably reason is that, as explained above, immigration boosts labor demand, not just labor supply!"
If you move someone from an H1B to LPR (green card), you’ve freed up an H1B for a new arrival, right? So it’s still an increase in new arrivals being facilitated, up to the total recapture, some just happen later and in another category?
No; H1s are counted against the year in which they're initially issued and don't reappear for reissuing if someone switches to another visa category or leaves the country.
They're time-capped at 3 years + a 3 year extension (plus whatever time you can recapture based on having been out of the country during that window), but if you have a pending I-140 application, it extends indefinitely until the application's acted on by USCIS. So if, say, you're facing a 15 year wait to get to the front of employment-based Green Card queue, you can stay in H-1B status all that time. Of course, you're at the mercy of your both H-1B employer (or need to find a new job quickly) and your I-140 sponsor, who often but aren't necessarily the same, throughout....
They could pass this through reconciliation if they wanted to but that’s true of all things. Increasing the application fees comes across as a bad idea. The fees for this are already exorbitant. How about simplifying the process so you don’t need lawyers and then increase the fees?
I feel similarly; in the UK, application fees are way above the costs of running the system, but the effect there is not to build a political consensus in favour of immigration because it's a net benefit to the government finances; the politics is just as toxic as when the fees used to be cheaper, it's just now much harder (and in some cases impossible) for poorer people to sponsor family members. As a method of creating a better budget position, it creates a lot of real hardship.
Agreed, it does not work the way Matt thinks it would.
It frustrates me no end when people talk about some policy idea as if it was a pure hypothetical when it is an actual working policy in another country, and they could look at that country and see the unintended effects.
Total fees - ie visas, visa renewals, "green card" (ILR) and naturalisation are well over £10,000 (ie $15,000) for a spouse into the UK. For someone coming in on a working visa, you can add at least 50% to that and probably more.
"How about simplifying the process so you don’t need lawyers and then increase the fees?"
You need a lawyer for this in the same way you need an accountant to do your taxes: you don't, but many people like having one. Just follow the instructions and it'll be fine. In fact, I'd rate a lot of immigration paperwork as easier than taxes. There's a lot of paperwork, but that's mostly because they ask the same things multiple times. I'd be all in favor of a web form which only asks for the information once... In fact, I bet that would reduce the cost of processing these (paper) forms, which means the same fees would generate a profit.
All that said, I'd say that USCIS's fees are already pretty steep. I wouldn't be in favor of raising them. I guess that you could charge more for expedited processing (something they've done with H1Bs), but I have mixed feelings about that.
Great article & agreed with all - American STEM degrees should come with a Green Card stapled to them (provisional, if you like; in that case, keep it if you have job over some salary 3-5 years out). Also, foreign STEM grads are fine, but sadly vary in quality, and we need doctors, nurses, and teachers, too. Reduce chain immigration in favor of more H1Bs (but curb gaming by the outsourcers), and really need new temp worker programs at scale so Mexicans, etc. can come & go as they like for work, seasonal, etc. Also take educated Latin Americans, similar to open Canadian border, basically simple NAFTA-like visa or something, but we need way more professional-level Latinos in the USA, especially here in Silicon Valley, also NYC, Seattle, Chicago, etc.
The idea of letting Canadians apply for work in the US is a good one. We could probably expand that out to include the EU/UK/EFTA countries/Australia/NZ pretty easily. That's some low hanging immigration fruit that -Borjas aside- even people opposed to immigration should be willing to accept.
Also Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, which would address some of the likely concerns about race.
Note that large-scale immigration from poorer European countries did provoke a backlash in the US in the 1890s-1920s and in the UK in the 2000s-2010s (it was a large factor in Brexit: no-one minds all the middle class French people in London, lots of people object to all the working class Polish people in small towns).
Suggestion: pass a law that allows for a bilateral executive agreement (ie a treaty but without the need to get 2/3 in the Senate) with any country with a nominal GDP of 40% of the US GDP or higher for unlimited immigration in both directions (on payment of a reasonable application fee and excluding felons). This would also bring a real benefit to Americans in that there would be twenty or so countries they could emigrate to freely (there are 34 on the list, but I'm assuming that a bunch wouldn't agree on their end, notably all the oil states). And the American citizens living in those countries would still have votes in the US, which creates a useful lobbying force and voting bloc to preserve this (note that one reason Brexit passed is that UK citizens living abroad have restricted voting rights and about half of them couldn't vote in it).
40% is based on eyeballing the list of countries GDP and estimating about where a cut-off should go and then finding a round number that works (Spain was the country I was aiming to put the line below).
40% would get you the following (IMF, 2021):
Europe: Luxembourg, Switzerland, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Netherlands, Finland, Austria, Germany, Belgium, San Marino, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Malta, Spain, Cyprus, Slovenia
Asia-Pacific: Singapore, Australia, Macau, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Brunei, Taiwan
Second, nominal values money transfers appropriately, an important factor in the question of whether there will be floods of immigrants.
Third, currency valuations respond a lot faster to a disaster, meaning that the door can close in a hurry if there is a situation that would lead to a mass exodus from a country.
Just to give a sense of why I picked this cut-off point, you could go a bit further; the next few countries go: Estonia, Czechia, Bahrain, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Greece, St Kitts and Nevis, Latvia, Hungary, Barbados, Poland, Oman, Croatia, Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua and Barbuda, Chile, Palau, Romania, Panama.
And that's as low as you can go because the next country on the list is China, and Chinese growth is high enough that you want a bit of a cushion...
Your assumptions about the racial composition of Canada may need updating. "Canadian" no longer means Anglo descendants (or even, shudder, French people).
Spanish language speaker maps poorly to our race concept, which is pretty heavy on the phenotype. The engine of national Hispanic racial politics being light skinned spokespeople for the dark skinned subaltern is pretty gross and pervasive once you notice it.
The Anglophone Caribbean outside of Jamaica (which has about 40% of the pcGDP of the others) has similar per capita GDPs to the EU Eastern European countries, but there are obviously far more people in Eastern Europe, so the absolute scale of migration would be much less of an issue there, and while there are real cultural differences with African-Americans, a English-speaking population descended from Africans who were forcibly transported to the Americas and then enslaved for generations after getting there is certainly not something that the US is unfamiliar with.
As I said in another comment, middle class French people in London have not proven to be a problem even though there are a lot of them (at one point, London had the fifth or sixth largest number of French citizens of any city, after only the biggest cities in France), but similar numbers of working class Polish people in small towns that are unfamiliar with immigration and have never really been cosmopolitan were much more resisted by the locals.
There was a scandal a decade or so ago about Gurkha soldiers not being granted the right to live in the UK after an honourable discharge, even though they had often lived in barracks in the UK for decades at that point. The result was one far-right party putting out leaflets about another one saying that the other one supported Poles living in the UK and opposed Gurkhas because the other party was racist and this far-right party was the right sort of xenophobes...
>>>The hope is that this should qualify for reconciliation under parliamentary rules<<<
And my hope is Schumer fires any parliamentarian who doesn't play ball on anything the majority wants. (Punctiliousness in the defense of fake rules that are both anti-democratic and harmful to the creation of policy isn't something to be admired).
Also, someone recently (I think in NY Times) had a piece the other day about Canada's province-driven immigration system, and how it should be adopted by the US. Big agree! Makes a lot of sense. If Alabama doesn't want many immigrants and Washington State does, NO PROBLEM!
If ivermectin isn't a good idea, why are their clinical trials? My facebook feed is really positive towards it. The problem is people need something immediately. Our regulatory system has worked against us in this pandemic as it doesn't value time. A therapeutic after you've already gotten covid and recovered aren't worth much.
As a PCP, I beg you : please don't get your medical advice from Facebook. Clinical trials are developed when a treatment looks promising. Most of the time clinical trials are disappointing; occasionally you find a treatment beneficial. Here is a summary from Uptodate (a medical website) about Ivermectin:
Ivermectin – We do not use ivermectin for treatment of COVID-19 outside of clinical trials, as with other interventions that are not supported by high-quality data, consistent with recommendations from the WHO [3]. Data on ivermectin for COVID-19 are of low quality. In a meta-analysis of 16 trials evaluating ivermectin (only four included patients with severe disease), the effects on mortality, need for invasive mechanical ventilation, and duration of hospitalization were all very uncertain because of limitations in trial design and low numbers of events [46]. In a retrospective review of 280 patients hospitalized with COVID-19, receipt of ivermectin was associated with a lower mortality rate; however, patients who received ivermectin were also more likely to receive corticosteroids, highlighting the potential for confounders to impact the findings of nonrandomized studies [151]. Ivermectin had originally been proposed as a potential therapy based on in vitro activity against SARS-CoV-2; however, the drug levels used in the in vitro studies far exceed those achieved in vivo with safe drug doses [152]. We reserve use of ivermectin for prevention of Strongyloides reactivation in select individuals receiving glucocorticoids.
This is not an attempt by the medical community or big pharma to suppress data b/c a treatment is low-cost, but potentially life-saving (or whatever your Facebook page is claiming). This is an appropriate response by the medical community to a treatment that has not been shown to be beneficial. As a counter argument , I would point to Dexamethasone which IS an old, inexpensive medication that HAS shown benefit and IS widely used to treat Covid.
Someone posted the video of the lady walking around on all fours and it had a joke about ivermectin. Several ladies then said their families had a lot of success using ivermectin. I highly doubt they were going to the feed & seed and buying the horse product. Especially now that all the stores have pulled to save it for their regular horse customers. A PCP prescribed it for them and they felt it helped. It did not sound like they had been hospitalized.
The idea that the medical community isn’t stumbling around in the dark is absurd. There was zero standard of care for this last year. If PCPs somewhere didn’t just prescribe stuff, then we wouldn’t know about dexamethasone. Trial design is going to really crappy in the middle of a pandemic.
15,000 people died after we developed the mRNA vaccines but before we decided to give it out.
You misunderstand me. I'm not against someone trying something off-label if there is some evidence of efficacy if the benefits outweigh the risks. It just seems pretty damn clear that Ivermectin doesn't work. Neither does a lot of stuff that was tried: Azithromycin, Tamiflu, Hydroxychloroquine and many others. Ivermectin, taken in appropriate doses prescribed by a doctor, is fairly low-risk, so if you want to use that as a placebo, that's up to you and your doctor.
Several ladies said the Ivermectin helped them? Even you can admit that this is hardly proof. Doctors and the medical community are certainly flawed. I, myself, have been frustrated with CDC and its blunders during this pandemic. But not on the Ivermectin issue. For some reason this has been picked up and honed as a political issue the way Hydroxychloroquine was initially. Why Ivermectin and not some other similar med that was tried and didn't work, I'm not sure. But this brings me back to my original plea to you. Why in heaven's name would you trust some randoms on facebook over your doctor? Why?
This physician’s attitude is good when your not in a pandemic and it’s great that we are almost out of a pandemic, but her attitude is symptomatic of the problems we faced the last year and half on the regulatory side of things.
YES! Not only that, but for a mere $19.95, I can send you a special patented, all-natural product that will both prevent and treat those worms. Just send the money to Dr. Elana Krazydoc , PO BOX 666, Los Angeles , CA . You're welcome.
"If ivermectin isn't a good idea, why are their clinical trials?"
This is pretty nonsensical. The purpose of clinical trials is to prove or disprove something as a "good idea."
Yes, in vitro studies suggested that it exhibits anti-viral properties... at a concentration equivalent to 20X the lethal blood plasma concentration in humans.
It sounds like many researchers thought it was at least as good an idea as hydroxychloroquine. It seems to be more successful than that in trials, but not as good as dexamethasone or monoclonal antibodies.
And we found that out because we tried it. This was prescribed for mild cases and multiple people seemed to think it helped. It very well may not help with mortality of severe cases. Clinical trials are for standards of care that have shown promise and it quantify which plan works best. We seemed to have a lot of people that got caught with their thumb of their ass not wanting to make decisions while people were dropping like flies.
"The problem is people need something immediately." — You mean, like a vaccine? …Given away for free at CVSes around the country? …With walk-in appointments?
I’ve always though we should have open borders with the UK. Or at least reciprocal work and live privileges. I suspect both countries would benefit. Both counties could still have controls at the borders for security, but otherwise let there be free movement.
True open borders, ie treat flights as internal, means a common visa policy as well (like Schengen in Europe - otherwise someone could get a UK visa and then come to America), but reciprocal rights to live and work, what the EU calls "free movement of labour", yeah, why not?
How many people do you think would arrive or leave either way?
UK/US, tens of thousands a year, but low tens. Might get an occasional surge, like the many well-educated cosmopolitan Brits who left the country after the Brexit vote (though Trump certainly would have put some off).
I would say potentially 10% of UK. Maybe 6 million. But that’s over several years. And I can see an equal amount go over there.
Biggest issue would be healthcare and benefits. UK is a lot more generous. But treat it like it is now.
You could see a net flow of the chronically ill to the UK, ie permanent benefits tourism, with a converse flow to the US of people who are willing to risk poorer insurance. Risk-pool death spiral.
That's what homo economicus would do, but in practice I think that the number of people who want to pick up and move their lives over across an ocean is small enough that it's probably not a really big deal.
I remember when I suggested in this comment section that someone who was really irate that DC residents don't get congressional representation should move a few miles in literally any direction, and they were like "HOW DARE YOU SIR?"
It's a mystery why people react differently to
"Should affluent, mobile people be allowed to move between two comparably affluent countries?"
and
"Should people who do not have the resources to leave their homes be deprived of political representation for that reason?"
People get really annoyed when they're asked to do things for arbitrary and unjustifiable reasons, it's true.
Non-citizens resident in the UK have to pay an annual fee for use of the NHS - the "immigration health surcharge" - but £624 per year is still pretty cheap compared to US health insurance.
Also, chronically ill people tend to be less mobile - they're older, more established in their jobs/careers, and they are chronically ill and have built up support systems around where they live.
It seems likely there could be complete freedom of movement among all the Five Eyes countries and Japan and Taiwan with little political backlash in any of them, it probably wouldn't even be that noticeable to most people.
I think that Japan would be the country that would be most likely to have a backlash.
Probably, though how many people would really want to move there, if they weren't independently wealthy or didn't have some relatively high status job lined up there?
I'd be worried about weeaboos.
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[google google]
Huh. You have just taught me a new word, and I may or may not be grateful to you.
The weeaboos who would actually go do it have usually already tried (usually "teaching English" to support themselves while comically failing to make some kind of arts career and returning home).
I’d agree with that. But because there would be protests over racism. Even though the countries are often held up as models for us.
Congress as admissions committee - trying to curate and shape this year's matriculating class. Make sure it has the right mix of diversity, legacies, merit, ability to pay, etc.
And as usual, the biggest loophole is that you are guaranteed admissions if your parents are alums.
As an example of an unintended consequence, if Canadians were allowed to live and work freely in the US, we wouldn't have gotten the delightful 2009 romcom The Proposal starring Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock with the latter as the undocumented Canadian immigrant (kind of ironic since it's Reynolds who was *actually* born in Canada).
To protect American jobs, we have to pass legislation preventing the impersonation of Americans by foreign actors.
It's not just Ryan Reynolds, though he's a repeat offender. Why did Anya Taylor-Joy, an Argentine Brit, have to take jobs away from hard-working Kentuckians for "The Queens Gambit"? Aussies like Mel Gibson pretending to work for the LAPD? Another Brit like Daniel Kaluuya, stealing American jobs -- I just want to tell him to Get Out of Our Country.
No American roles for foreign actors! Keep America American, on the screen!
Not just actors - it is cultural appropriation to have a Swiss/Canadian like Celine Dion representing the United States at the MGM Grand Casino.
And don't get me started on Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. Go back to Alberta, ya foreigners!
Hey, leave Neil Young out of this! He actually got naturalized last year!
AT Joy played an American (well, proto-American) in The Witch, too. But what’s weird is that in that movie her character immigrated from England so she speaks with a British accent, but in the DVD extras she sounds American, whereas in the extras for Queen’s Gambit, where her character is American, she sounds British! She’s just messing with us.
I went to a science fair a few years ago, and it was really striking how many of the kids presenting were children of immigrants. It makes perfect sense to make it as easy as possible to get these visas.
Blue collar and service wages are increasing for the first time in a generation. Yet many American workers are still far from a living wage. I see signs at Georgia Krogers advertising $12/hr. Gas station in Maine were advertising $13.50/hr. Employers obviously think these are “good” wages because they are advertising them openly. Yet I have no idea how someone making $13.50 an hour in Bangor can pay for an apartment and still have enough money to heat it.
A true populist would not panic at the first signs of inflation or restaurants being short staffed. He would permit there to be a shake out in the restaurant industry where places that figure out how to pay a living wage survive and places whose business models require worker exploitation close.
We’ve had abundant labor and stagnant working class wages for 35 years. It has wrought carnage throughout the American working class: men who cannot provide for families, women who cannot find marriageable men, children born out of wedlock, opiate addiction and deaths of despair. Life expectancies were decreasing before COVID. Let’s give scarcity a chance. If a significant number of American manufacturers start going bankrupt because labor is too expensive, the case for increased immigration would become strong. Until then, increasing working class wages is a political and moral imperative.
“Yet I have no idea how someone making $13.50 an hour in Bangor can pay for an apartment and still have enough money to heat it.”
They share an apartment/house with other people, likely their spouse or other family. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Yeah. The individual vs. household income dynamic seems missed here. Also the transient nature of poverty that both narrowly minimum wage positions and poverty - in general - are temporary. The cohort ages out. Long-term individual poverty is exceedingly rare.
Do you have a link? That’s a pretty extraordinary claim.
Which claim? That incomes rise during a career in cohort phases or that bouts of poverty are temporary?
That the number of people who suffer from long term poverty is exceedingly low.
This link will get you there: https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c14440/c14440.pdf
"Using an after-tax household income measure, we estimate that while roughly 1 in 10 people are in poverty in any given year, over 4 in 10 people spent at least one year in poverty between 2007 and 2018. This implies substantial mobility in and out of poverty—for example, 41 percent of those in poverty in 2007 were out of poverty in the following year."
Further: Just 9% of <those in poverty >were poor for at least 10 of the 12 years through 2018.
UC Davis has good research here too - this one is on "deep poverty" but similar findings ... "While most spells of deep poverty in the U.S. are short, with two-thirds of individuals who fall into deep poverty exiting in two years or less, re-entry is also common."
https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/post/safety-net-enables-faster-more-permanent-exit-deep-poverty
Does it have to be doable with single income being at a grocery store or gas station? that seems like a high bar.
I'll edge away from the qualitative question of "goodness" and hang tight on the claim that it's not reasonable to expect that _all_ jobs will pay enough to maintain a residence on one salary.
"Service jobs" does not necessarily equal "gas station attendant". The two largest sub-categories (by job number) under "services-providing" in the BLS stats are "State and local government", followed by "Professional and business services" and "Health care" in a near tie -- there's obviously a spread of incomes in those sectors as well, but I feel very safe claiming that their median is well above "gas station attendant."
To narrow in on the point a bit: the world needs gas station attendants too. All jobs should have dignity, and gas station attendants shouldn't fear that a health problem will drive them into penury. And for absolutely certain, they should be able to be _housed_. But setting the bar at "...and not only housed, but be able to afford housing alone or even as the sole breadwinner in a family" seems like an incredible stretch, and more to the point one that would be much easier to achieve by building a lot more state-provisioned housing than by fussing around with immigration policy at any level.
(Back in the qualitative world, I'm not even sure that living alone is a good idea for most people, but I'm aware that opinions on that differ wildly and passionately, and for sure this country has demonstrated a remarkable lack of aptitude at building group housing situations at any level above "flophouse".)
This entire article is talking about how to increase immigration of skilled workers, who, by definition, are not competing for $12/hr restaurant jobs.
In fact, they're precisely the people whose lifestyles increase aggregate demand for those jobs, thereby pushing up wages.
If you want to get past the last 35 years of, I agree, importation of low-cost, low-skilled labor... the best way to speed that up is to pull a bunch of folks in who will be at or near the top of the pyramid.
One of the fundamental cognitive errors of populism is imagining that the economy is zero sum- that there's a fixed bowl of wealth, and 'we' (I'm sure all populists are 100% descended from an original Native American tribe, of course) have to hoard it and keep 'them' from getting any of it. In fact the economy is positive sum- letting in more smart people increases the total amount of wealth and makes everyone richer. That's why the country that literally had open borders for the entire 19th century is now the world's wealthiest!
Anyways, seeing as I do recognize that letting in lots of less-skilled immigrants is politically unpopular even if it's a good idea- increasing *skilled* immigration is not gonna affect your $13.50 gas station attendant dude. We're talking more software engineers and more scientists
And your fundamental cognitive error is failing to account for the fact that, while immigration is overall a good thing, the benefits do not accrue to all Americans equally.
Increased national wealth = more money for a stronger social welfare state. I am pro-capitalism, tax it fairly, and then use those funds to help the poor. Universal healthcare, a negative income tax- you name it, I'm for it. This is the way.
If you disagree, please let me know how a poorer United States with less national wealth will be helping the poor. With a shrinking population, less workers to pay into Social Security, more retirees and less young workers contributing to the tax rolls for our already enormous social welfare expenses..... How do you imagine this working?
Yes, if you can increase immigration and the welfare state then great. But if you can’t increase the welfare state then you can’t increase immigration either.
I was reading an article about how pro immigration economists privately acknowledge that low skill immigration while a net positive in the long term results in some losers. However there is an unspoken agreement to play it down. It may have been Noah Smith who wrote about it. Not sure.
“I am pro-capitalism, tax it fairly…”
If you tax a thing you get less of that thing.
Cool. So if we tax the obscene concentrated wealth of multi-billionaires that is distorting our economy and undermining our democracy, we can get less of it? I'm in!
The fallacy begging market is alive and well!
Then if taxes were zero growth would be infinite? Kind of a silly argument. There is a point of maximum utility and that point is not zero.
“Then if taxes were zero growth would be infinite? Kind of a silly argument.”
Indeed.
If you legalize and tax you usually get more than if it is illegal, and less than if it is legal and untaxed.
“People act like a United States with a tight labor supply and strong unions has never existed. It did exist”
Oh? When?
"... benefits do not accrue to all Americans equally."
Surely true. But to justify immigration, it's probably sufficient that they accrue *proportionally*, even if not equally.
So, sure -- Zuckerberg is going to capture a lot more of the benefits of growth than Tiffany at the diner does, because the billionaires gobble up most of everything. But if her wages go up proportionally, then doesn't she win from immigration, too?
Huh? Do children growing up make people's wages go down? Did wages drop for low-skilled workers when the Baby Boomers (the US's largest cohort of children) came of age?
Immigrants are just someone else's babies, to rephrase Steve King (!). Every low-skilled immigrant needs to buy houses and food and furniture and toiletries etc. These create jobs for Tiffany just as much as they compete for her current one.
Obligatory Noahpinion link: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-immigration-doesnt-reduce-wages
"These create jobs for Tiffany ..."
As well as helping to fund Tiffany's Social Security pension after she retires, bringing more customers into the diner, reviving the small-town tax-rolls so that they can re-open the public library, etc. etc.
I was wrong to focus only on her wages in considering the case that she shares in the benefits.
If we let in a bunch of highly skilled workers how does this hurt not help Tiffany?
I remember how foreign it seemed, as student in the late 90s in Vienna, seeing grown men who had "real" jobs as waiters at neighborhood cafes - and they weren't depending on tips to get by, because nobody paid them tips.
"...grown men who had "real" jobs as waiters..."
Part of the story here will be better social services and safety net.
"...a member like Rep. Darryl Issa (R-CA) will write a bill that sounds good to me."
Insert Onion's "Worse Person You Know Just Made a Great Point" meme.
Do you have a new editorial assistant? Today's column was uncommonly well written, just at the level of prose. Sentences ran smoothly. I did not notice typos. (Though perhaps other readers did). Anyhow -- it's nice when your columns are properly proofed.
How can we (realistically) get more skilled immigrants into the US? I think the most realistic path is just lengthening OPT visas for STEM grads of US colleges. Every time you suggest importing current working professionals, like software engineers, existing domestic groups are opposed to the competition- I've even seen people express that sentiment here on SB. Whereas, a brand new Master's or PhD grad doesn't have many job skills yet, so it seems like an easier/more realistic way to get smart folks in. Lengthen the OPT period to 5 or 10 years, and maybe provide a path to a Green Card directly from there.
My further out there idea is that the federal government could allow individual states to issue more visas, above & beyond what the feds do. It would certainly make the rich states richer as California, Massachusetts etc. let in more smart immigrants and Arkansas obviously doesn't- but could be a viable path too, use lots of federalism arguments, etc.
"...the most realistic path is just lengthening OPT visas for STEM grads of US colleges...Lengthen the OPT period to 5 or 10 years, and maybe provide a path to a Green Card directly from there.."
I vote for this. Though I don't think it needs to be restricted to STEM graduates. If a new PhD in Indonesian History wants to stay and duke it out in the job market, let them.
"...allow individual states to issue more visas, above & beyond what the feds do."
The Constitution gives Congress the power "To establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization...," and I am pretty sure that "uniform" precludes differences between states.
That was among the changes from the Articles -- States gave up the right to set independent immigration policies. And I believe Congress cannot make different policies for different states, either.
Immigration law already has visas with numbers tied to local economic indicators like GDP, unemployment, etc --- the existing (much-criticized) EB-5 investor program has investment thresholds that vary and, IIRC, a stream that's only available in some places. Similarly, you can only get an H1-B if you're going to be working somewhere that isn't on strike and will pay you a salary that's above a local threshold.
Whether expanding this with employment-based immigration in this way --- adding new would-be employees in places that already have a job shortage, for example --- a different question, but it's at least possible to do this sort of policy design.
(Whether it's possible to go full-on Canada and have state nomination programs, now that's a more interesting question....)
(I'm not a lawyer, I'm just pretending to be one on the Internet) I don't see why it's not uniform if you offer the *option* to issue extra visas to all 50 states. If some don't choose to take you up on it, that's up to them. It's really not setting different policies for different states. Choosing to delegate is part of having a power!
It would set up some pretty interesting battles in red states- lots of them are heavy agricultural visa users, and I bet business & Big Farm interests would start pressuring legislators there to issue more of those. Anything that sets the right up to fight itself sounds like a good wedge issue to me
A plan to States to sponsor immigrants would definitely have to be approved by Congress, but its power to take immigration policy doesn't preclude it from also delegating some immigration decisions to States. I think State sponsorship of immigrants is very good idea.
It would only work, though, probably, if the immigrants were required to maintain residency in the sponsoring State until citizenship. Once a citizen, neither Congress or States can restrict interstate movement. But for legal residents that aren't citizens, that likely is permissible, depending on how literally one reads the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment, which only applies to "citizens".
In principle, I suppose the visa could be tied to place of residence. But you just don't want to go down this road.
Plus, my point below about the Constitutional prohibition on non-uniform rules for immigration.
You could separate the visa from the work permit and only make it legal to work in states that have granted permission to do so. You can travel and live where you like, but you can't work there.
Oh, there's lots of ways to go for baroque. I'm just saying that the gains won't be worth the candle.
Like because I can't figure out whether you meant to say "baroque" or "broke" but it works either way.
That's nothing -- I abused a different idiom in the next sentence, too (a British one, because I think RG is British?)
Not everybody can perform at this level. Even I have to warm up first.
“In economic terms, though, the number of new people arriving legally is what counts, so the fact that fewer than 100 percent of the new immigrants are actually new arrivals somewhat reduces the economic benefits of recapture.” Some of the nonimmigrants in H or L status will eventually get tired of waiting for a green card and move to another country, or get an H/L extension application rejected and be forced to leave. So the economic impact might be a little bigger than implied by the “new arrivals” figure.
True, especially in the new remote-friendly universe
This sentence bothered me too, because it misses that some H/L nonimmigrants getting LPRs will increase economic output since they can more readily move to better-fitting jobs or start companies that in turn employ people, which is difficult (though not impossible) as a nonimmigrant.
Saw this headline and for a brief moment thought you were going to talk about the anticompetitive credit card oligopoly we have in the US.
I can’t help but think that the positive wage and benefit changes resulting from the labor shortage are at least partly the result of the fall in immigration.
So, I *think* that MY's response will be that this effect is outweighed by total economic growth due to immigration. But I'd be curious to see the numbers penciled out.
One thing that I would've liked to see more in this article is just more discussion of what consensus exists on the economic effects of immigration.
Sure, immigration causes growth because each immigrant adds some output, but does the economy grow in per capita terms? If so, through what mechanisms? And does this growth benefit everyone?
Not that it isn't plausible that immigration has the beneficial effects claimed in this article-- I'd just be interested in seeing the research that backs up those claims.
According to Noah Smith: "Immigration can occasionally have some small negative impacts on labor markets. In the middle of an economic catastrophe like the Depression, when jobs are scarce, it can bump a few people out of jobs. New immigrants can compete with existing immigrants.
But overall, immigration — even of the lowest skilled variety — has very little or no impact on native-born wages. And sometimes even a positive impact. The most probably reason is that, as explained above, immigration boosts labor demand, not just labor supply!"
(from https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-immigration-doesnt-reduce-wages)
If you move someone from an H1B to LPR (green card), you’ve freed up an H1B for a new arrival, right? So it’s still an increase in new arrivals being facilitated, up to the total recapture, some just happen later and in another category?
No; H1s are counted against the year in which they're initially issued and don't reappear for reissuing if someone switches to another visa category or leaves the country.
Kind of, H1bs are time capped which tis article is missing (unless this recently changed).
They're time-capped at 3 years + a 3 year extension (plus whatever time you can recapture based on having been out of the country during that window), but if you have a pending I-140 application, it extends indefinitely until the application's acted on by USCIS. So if, say, you're facing a 15 year wait to get to the front of employment-based Green Card queue, you can stay in H-1B status all that time. Of course, you're at the mercy of your both H-1B employer (or need to find a new job quickly) and your I-140 sponsor, who often but aren't necessarily the same, throughout....
They could pass this through reconciliation if they wanted to but that’s true of all things. Increasing the application fees comes across as a bad idea. The fees for this are already exorbitant. How about simplifying the process so you don’t need lawyers and then increase the fees?
I feel similarly; in the UK, application fees are way above the costs of running the system, but the effect there is not to build a political consensus in favour of immigration because it's a net benefit to the government finances; the politics is just as toxic as when the fees used to be cheaper, it's just now much harder (and in some cases impossible) for poorer people to sponsor family members. As a method of creating a better budget position, it creates a lot of real hardship.
Agreed, it does not work the way Matt thinks it would.
It frustrates me no end when people talk about some policy idea as if it was a pure hypothetical when it is an actual working policy in another country, and they could look at that country and see the unintended effects.
" It frustrates me no end when people talk about some policy idea as if it was a pure hypothetical...."
What, you want to shut down the whole Substack business model?
Total fees - ie visas, visa renewals, "green card" (ILR) and naturalisation are well over £10,000 (ie $15,000) for a spouse into the UK. For someone coming in on a working visa, you can add at least 50% to that and probably more.
"How about simplifying the process so you don’t need lawyers and then increase the fees?"
You need a lawyer for this in the same way you need an accountant to do your taxes: you don't, but many people like having one. Just follow the instructions and it'll be fine. In fact, I'd rate a lot of immigration paperwork as easier than taxes. There's a lot of paperwork, but that's mostly because they ask the same things multiple times. I'd be all in favor of a web form which only asks for the information once... In fact, I bet that would reduce the cost of processing these (paper) forms, which means the same fees would generate a profit.
All that said, I'd say that USCIS's fees are already pretty steep. I wouldn't be in favor of raising them. I guess that you could charge more for expedited processing (something they've done with H1Bs), but I have mixed feelings about that.
Great article & agreed with all - American STEM degrees should come with a Green Card stapled to them (provisional, if you like; in that case, keep it if you have job over some salary 3-5 years out). Also, foreign STEM grads are fine, but sadly vary in quality, and we need doctors, nurses, and teachers, too. Reduce chain immigration in favor of more H1Bs (but curb gaming by the outsourcers), and really need new temp worker programs at scale so Mexicans, etc. can come & go as they like for work, seasonal, etc. Also take educated Latin Americans, similar to open Canadian border, basically simple NAFTA-like visa or something, but we need way more professional-level Latinos in the USA, especially here in Silicon Valley, also NYC, Seattle, Chicago, etc.
The idea of letting Canadians apply for work in the US is a good one. We could probably expand that out to include the EU/UK/EFTA countries/Australia/NZ pretty easily. That's some low hanging immigration fruit that -Borjas aside- even people opposed to immigration should be willing to accept.
Also Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, which would address some of the likely concerns about race.
Note that large-scale immigration from poorer European countries did provoke a backlash in the US in the 1890s-1920s and in the UK in the 2000s-2010s (it was a large factor in Brexit: no-one minds all the middle class French people in London, lots of people object to all the working class Polish people in small towns).
Suggestion: pass a law that allows for a bilateral executive agreement (ie a treaty but without the need to get 2/3 in the Senate) with any country with a nominal GDP of 40% of the US GDP or higher for unlimited immigration in both directions (on payment of a reasonable application fee and excluding felons). This would also bring a real benefit to Americans in that there would be twenty or so countries they could emigrate to freely (there are 34 on the list, but I'm assuming that a bunch wouldn't agree on their end, notably all the oil states). And the American citizens living in those countries would still have votes in the US, which creates a useful lobbying force and voting bloc to preserve this (note that one reason Brexit passed is that UK citizens living abroad have restricted voting rights and about half of them couldn't vote in it).
40% is based on eyeballing the list of countries GDP and estimating about where a cut-off should go and then finding a round number that works (Spain was the country I was aiming to put the line below).
40% would get you the following (IMF, 2021):
Europe: Luxembourg, Switzerland, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Netherlands, Finland, Austria, Germany, Belgium, San Marino, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Malta, Spain, Cyprus, Slovenia
Asia-Pacific: Singapore, Australia, Macau, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Brunei, Taiwan
Middle East: Qatar, Israel, United Arab Emirates
Americas: Canada, Bahamas.
Why nominal and not PPP?
First, nominal is much harder to manipulate.
Second, nominal values money transfers appropriately, an important factor in the question of whether there will be floods of immigrants.
Third, currency valuations respond a lot faster to a disaster, meaning that the door can close in a hurry if there is a situation that would lead to a mass exodus from a country.
Just to give a sense of why I picked this cut-off point, you could go a bit further; the next few countries go: Estonia, Czechia, Bahrain, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Greece, St Kitts and Nevis, Latvia, Hungary, Barbados, Poland, Oman, Croatia, Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua and Barbuda, Chile, Palau, Romania, Panama.
And that's as low as you can go because the next country on the list is China, and Chinese growth is high enough that you want a bit of a cushion...
Okay, but what about Slovenia?
'Cause we definitely have a problem with Slovenian illegals here. Even if they are doing jobs that no American wants to do.
They were literally the last country that got in at the original cut-off.
Oops. Reading fail on my fault.
It would only work if it was reciprocal.
Agreed, and it would be a useful encouragement to certain countries to relax their immigration policy a bit (Japan and the UK in particular).
I assume you meant 40 percent per capita GDP?
Yes. Sorry, that was in there at one point in the edit and I remember removing a duplicate, so I suspect I must have done that twice.
progressives would not accept this idea, they would call it racist. It would privilege white immigration over non-white immigration.
Your assumptions about the racial composition of Canada may need updating. "Canadian" no longer means Anglo descendants (or even, shudder, French people).
But the ethnic composition of Canada is clearly way different than our other neighbor.
People from East and South Asia are white for purposes of the American food fight.
Many Mexicans also self-identify as white, both in Mexico and here as Mexican-Americans.
Spanish language speaker maps poorly to our race concept, which is pretty heavy on the phenotype. The engine of national Hispanic racial politics being light skinned spokespeople for the dark skinned subaltern is pretty gross and pervasive once you notice it.
The Anglophone Caribbean outside of Jamaica (which has about 40% of the pcGDP of the others) has similar per capita GDPs to the EU Eastern European countries, but there are obviously far more people in Eastern Europe, so the absolute scale of migration would be much less of an issue there, and while there are real cultural differences with African-Americans, a English-speaking population descended from Africans who were forcibly transported to the Americas and then enslaved for generations after getting there is certainly not something that the US is unfamiliar with.
As I said in another comment, middle class French people in London have not proven to be a problem even though there are a lot of them (at one point, London had the fifth or sixth largest number of French citizens of any city, after only the biggest cities in France), but similar numbers of working class Polish people in small towns that are unfamiliar with immigration and have never really been cosmopolitan were much more resisted by the locals.
There was a scandal a decade or so ago about Gurkha soldiers not being granted the right to live in the UK after an honourable discharge, even though they had often lived in barracks in the UK for decades at that point. The result was one far-right party putting out leaflets about another one saying that the other one supported Poles living in the UK and opposed Gurkhas because the other party was racist and this far-right party was the right sort of xenophobes...
>>>The hope is that this should qualify for reconciliation under parliamentary rules<<<
And my hope is Schumer fires any parliamentarian who doesn't play ball on anything the majority wants. (Punctiliousness in the defense of fake rules that are both anti-democratic and harmful to the creation of policy isn't something to be admired).
Also, someone recently (I think in NY Times) had a piece the other day about Canada's province-driven immigration system, and how it should be adopted by the US. Big agree! Makes a lot of sense. If Alabama doesn't want many immigrants and Washington State does, NO PROBLEM!
If ivermectin isn't a good idea, why are their clinical trials? My facebook feed is really positive towards it. The problem is people need something immediately. Our regulatory system has worked against us in this pandemic as it doesn't value time. A therapeutic after you've already gotten covid and recovered aren't worth much.
As a PCP, I beg you : please don't get your medical advice from Facebook. Clinical trials are developed when a treatment looks promising. Most of the time clinical trials are disappointing; occasionally you find a treatment beneficial. Here is a summary from Uptodate (a medical website) about Ivermectin:
Ivermectin – We do not use ivermectin for treatment of COVID-19 outside of clinical trials, as with other interventions that are not supported by high-quality data, consistent with recommendations from the WHO [3]. Data on ivermectin for COVID-19 are of low quality. In a meta-analysis of 16 trials evaluating ivermectin (only four included patients with severe disease), the effects on mortality, need for invasive mechanical ventilation, and duration of hospitalization were all very uncertain because of limitations in trial design and low numbers of events [46]. In a retrospective review of 280 patients hospitalized with COVID-19, receipt of ivermectin was associated with a lower mortality rate; however, patients who received ivermectin were also more likely to receive corticosteroids, highlighting the potential for confounders to impact the findings of nonrandomized studies [151]. Ivermectin had originally been proposed as a potential therapy based on in vitro activity against SARS-CoV-2; however, the drug levels used in the in vitro studies far exceed those achieved in vivo with safe drug doses [152]. We reserve use of ivermectin for prevention of Strongyloides reactivation in select individuals receiving glucocorticoids.
This is not an attempt by the medical community or big pharma to suppress data b/c a treatment is low-cost, but potentially life-saving (or whatever your Facebook page is claiming). This is an appropriate response by the medical community to a treatment that has not been shown to be beneficial. As a counter argument , I would point to Dexamethasone which IS an old, inexpensive medication that HAS shown benefit and IS widely used to treat Covid.
Someone posted the video of the lady walking around on all fours and it had a joke about ivermectin. Several ladies then said their families had a lot of success using ivermectin. I highly doubt they were going to the feed & seed and buying the horse product. Especially now that all the stores have pulled to save it for their regular horse customers. A PCP prescribed it for them and they felt it helped. It did not sound like they had been hospitalized.
The idea that the medical community isn’t stumbling around in the dark is absurd. There was zero standard of care for this last year. If PCPs somewhere didn’t just prescribe stuff, then we wouldn’t know about dexamethasone. Trial design is going to really crappy in the middle of a pandemic.
15,000 people died after we developed the mRNA vaccines but before we decided to give it out.
You misunderstand me. I'm not against someone trying something off-label if there is some evidence of efficacy if the benefits outweigh the risks. It just seems pretty damn clear that Ivermectin doesn't work. Neither does a lot of stuff that was tried: Azithromycin, Tamiflu, Hydroxychloroquine and many others. Ivermectin, taken in appropriate doses prescribed by a doctor, is fairly low-risk, so if you want to use that as a placebo, that's up to you and your doctor.
Several ladies said the Ivermectin helped them? Even you can admit that this is hardly proof. Doctors and the medical community are certainly flawed. I, myself, have been frustrated with CDC and its blunders during this pandemic. But not on the Ivermectin issue. For some reason this has been picked up and honed as a political issue the way Hydroxychloroquine was initially. Why Ivermectin and not some other similar med that was tried and didn't work, I'm not sure. But this brings me back to my original plea to you. Why in heaven's name would you trust some randoms on facebook over your doctor? Why?
This physician’s attitude is good when your not in a pandemic and it’s great that we are almost out of a pandemic, but her attitude is symptomatic of the problems we faced the last year and half on the regulatory side of things.
"We reserve use of ivermectin for prevention of Strongyloides reactivation in select individuals receiving glucocorticoids."
So, if I have this right, you're saying the COVID is *actually* caused by threadworms?
This is big -- I just shared it with all of my Facebook groups. And I said it came from a real doctor, too!
YES! Not only that, but for a mere $19.95, I can send you a special patented, all-natural product that will both prevent and treat those worms. Just send the money to Dr. Elana Krazydoc , PO BOX 666, Los Angeles , CA . You're welcome.
Thanks, Doc! Check's in the mail!
While I have you here, can you confirm that "it only works in vitro" means that I should drink it from a glass?
If it works well "in vitro" then I bet it works amazing "in vino."
"If ivermectin isn't a good idea, why are their clinical trials?"
This is pretty nonsensical. The purpose of clinical trials is to prove or disprove something as a "good idea."
Yes, in vitro studies suggested that it exhibits anti-viral properties... at a concentration equivalent to 20X the lethal blood plasma concentration in humans.
It sounds like many researchers thought it was at least as good an idea as hydroxychloroquine. It seems to be more successful than that in trials, but not as good as dexamethasone or monoclonal antibodies.
And we found that out because we tried it. This was prescribed for mild cases and multiple people seemed to think it helped. It very well may not help with mortality of severe cases. Clinical trials are for standards of care that have shown promise and it quantify which plan works best. We seemed to have a lot of people that got caught with their thumb of their ass not wanting to make decisions while people were dropping like flies.
"The problem is people need something immediately." — You mean, like a vaccine? …Given away for free at CVSes around the country? …With walk-in appointments?
I present to you: https://www.cvs.com/immunizations/covid-19-vaccine